BATON ROUGE – Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell is warning citizens of a phone scam in which the caller claims to be an IRS official and attempts to intimidate the victim into making a payment via pre-loaded debit card or wire service.

Victims are told they owe money to the IRS and are often threatened with arrest, deportation or suspension of business or driver’s license. Calls often become hostile when the victim does not cooperate.

If you receive a phone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS, Caldwell and the IRS caution there are five things scammers often do but the IRS will not. Any one of these five things is a tell-tale sign of a scam.

The IRS will not:

• Call you about taxes you owe without first mailing you an official notice.

• Demand that you pay taxes without giving you the opportunity to question or appeal the amount they say you owe.

• Require you to use a specific payment method for your taxes, such as a prepaid debit card.

• Ask for credit or debit card numbers over the phone.

• Threaten to bring in local police or other law-enforcement groups to have you arrested for not paying.

If you get a phone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS, here’s what you should do:

• Instruct the caller that you will contact the IRS. The IRS can be reached at 1-800-829-1040 or www.IRS.gov.

• If you’ve been targeted by this scam, you should report the scam to the IRS at http://www.IRS.gov and also contact the Federal Trade Commission and use their “FTC Complaint Assistant” at FTC.gov. Please add “IRS Telephone Scam” to the comments of your report.